But there are so many other ways in which the human race could be wiped out any day now.

From catastrophic climate change to black holes and robot wars – here are 10 apocalyptic visions that could end the world as we know it.

Supervolcano

An eruption in Siberia 252million years ago wiped out 95 per cent of life on Earth. Many believe the next big blast is due and point to a supervolcano in America’s Yellow­­stone National Park.

Asteroid impact

This erupts every 600,000 years and is now 40,000 years late. Land in the area is 74cm higher than in 1923, indicating huge swelling underneath. And if it blows that’s curtains for humanity, say scientists.

This seems more like a familiar Hollywood plot than a potential reality. But scientists are legitimately worried that a space rock could one day wipe out the human race.

Experts agree that it would take an asteroid at least a mile across to wipe out civilisation, and that kind of impact happens less than once every million years. It is believed the dinosaurs were wiped out by a six-mile-wide asteroid which slammed into the Earth 66million years ago.

In a paper by Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, researchers say the greatest danger will be “clouds of dust projected into the upper atmosphere”. This would create an “impact winter”, affecting climate and food supplies, and creating political instability.

Bruce Willis won’t ride to the rescue either. Physicists claim it would be impossible to nuke one of these Earth-destroying asteroids as it hurtles towards us.

Magnetic reversal

Every few hundred thousand years the planet’s mag­netic field dwindles away then, over the next century, reappears with north and south poles flipped.

We know of about 170 pole reversals over the last 100million years. The last was 781,000 years ago, which makes the next one well overdue.

European Space Agency research shows the magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than previously thought and it might flip within the next 100 years.

Does it matter? Well, the magnetic field deflects particle storms, cosmic rays and even more powerful particles from deep space. Scientists say without it our ozone layer would be stripped, with disastrous consequences for life.

Global war

Many scientists fear a classic end-of-the-world scenario of global nuclear warfare. There are massive stockpiles of nukes which could trigger a catastrophe. Of the nine nations known to have nuclear capability, Russia, Pakistan and North Korea between them account for 16,300 nuclear weapons.

In 2008, Physics Today journal concluded that the detonation of 100 nuclear bombs, a fraction of the number out there, would plunge the world into a nuclear winter with the lowest temperatures in 1000 years. This would “likely eliminate the majority of the human population”.

Biological weapons, easier to develop, could be an even greater threat. Anthrax, for example, could kill 90 per cent of people exposed to it if released into the air.

Alien invasion

There is every chance that, somewhere in billions of galaxies, intelligent beings superior to humans exist. What if they come here in large numbers?

Stephen Hawking, who this year helped launch a major new effort to search for alien life, thinks it likely they would be looking for resources and bent on our destruction.

He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”

Other cosmologists suppose that aliens might introduce pests with a taste for human flesh or upset the delicate balance of our planet, casually destroying the Earth.

Black hole

Our galaxy is full of black holes, formed when giant stars collapse in on themselves. Their gravity is so strong they swallow everything, even the light that might give away their presence.

In July, scientists from Durham University discovered five previously unidentified “supermassive” black holes billions of times the size of our sun, increasing fears one could come closer to earth than previously anticipated.

Such a black hole wouldn’t need to swallow us up. Just passing nearby could hurl the Earth out of the solar system into deep space.

Global warming

A global temperature rise of six per cent would be enough to wipe out almost all life on the planet – us included.

Along the way we’d see the polar ice caps melting, increasing sea levels by up to 300ft. That means 75 per cent of human settlements would be under water, including London and most of eastern England.

There would be a wider spread of infectious diseases, acid­­ification of the oceans and more droughts and famines, as well as floods and land erosion. The Earth could end up like Venus where temperatures reach 482C.

Gamma-rays

Flashes of gamma-ray light are thought to be caused by the merging of two collapsed stars. They are the most powerful explosions in the universe with up to 10-quadrillion times the energy of our sun.

Bursts are detected about once a day but so far they have happened in galaxies millions of light years away. If such an event were to happen closer to home, the intense flash of gamma rays illuminating the Earth for 10 seconds would cook the atmos­­phere and destroy the ozone layer, causing a huge “extinction event”.

Astronomers point out that double stars are all-but undetectable and we would have no advance warning until the moment it hits us.

Robots

The Terminator films are still a sci-fi fantasy but robotic killing machines that act on their own are not too far from reality.

The UN have called for a ban on killer robots, presumably due to the fear that several countries are developing them.

Inventor Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal, says artificial intelli­­gence might be the “greatest existential threat” humans face. Professor Stephen Hawking recently said: “The development of full artificial intelli­­gence could spell the end of the human race.”

Pandemic

Throughout history, deadly diseases have wreaked havoc on the human race. In the 14th century, the Black Death killed one in every four Europeans and, in 1918, influenza took just two years to claim at least 50million lives.

Recent potential pandemics such as SARS, bird flu and MERS (a corona-virus which began in Saudi Arabia) all died down but experts say it is only a matter of time before one goes global.

If nature wasn’t bad enough, scientists have created mutant versions of diseases which, if they escaped from the lab, could wipe us all out. Only last year the University of Wisconsin-Madison created a life-threatening virus closely resembling the 1918 Spanish flu strain.

While we haven’t started ringing the alarm bells just yet, now might be the time to start your Scottish bucket list.

From experiencing the atmosphere of a ceilidh to climbing Ben Nevis, there's plenty of Scottish experiences that are truly breathtaking.